The final exam in Witch Hunt 101 at the University of Colorado boils down to a single essay question:

Whom does Ward Churchill work for?

Churchill made his position clear in a campus speech to 1,000 mostly adoring students Tuesday night.

Speaking with what my friend Ray Schoch of Loveland likes to call a “junior high sneer,” Churchill proclaimed to his faithful, “I do not work for the taxpayers of Colorado. I do not work for Bill Owens. I work for you.”

Later in the evening, when a student asked Churchill if he would abide by results of a student vote on his continued employment, he wouldn’t agree.

Apparently, he works for CU students only in a metaphorical sense.

That’s the way he says he referred to some civilian victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as “little Eichmanns” in an essay that has him in hot water.

Churchill continues to milk his newfound celebrity. On Tuesday, bodyguards from the American Indian Movement of Colorado escorted him. As Churchill spoke, a Native American whomped a drum to punctuate the professor’s points.

Still, Churchill was right about the taxpayers, Gov. Bill Owens and the CU Board of Regents, to whom Churchill claimed not to answer, “at least not in the sense that they think I do.”

State budget cuts to higher education have left a shell of a public university system. CU gets only 7 percent of its budget from state tax funds.

Also, Owens didn’t hire Churchill. He can’t fire him. As he calls for Churchill’s job and tries to end tenure for college faculty, the governor looks like the kind of demagogue he and the regents enabled Churchill to become.

As for the regents, their job is not to micro-manage individual teachers, even controversial ones like Churchill. Unless, of course, they want to lose better and brighter professors who will flee their special brand of McCarthyism.

But that still doesn’t answer the exam question faced by CU administrators as they conduct their 30-day witch hunt of Churchill’s writings and background.

The inquisitors should remember a couple of things:

First, they can’t fire Churchill for their own mistakes. Only 5 percent of CU’s professors receive tenure without a terminal degree. Churchill is among them.

In 1991, CU officials granted Churchill an appointment as a tenured professor in communications with nothing more than a master’s. In 1997, CU transferred that tenure to ethnic studies.

University officials judged Churchill’s scholarship competent then. They also ignored his 9/11 essay for three years, until politicians started meddling.

Second, Churchill’s claim to Indian blood may be tenuous, but as Indian activist Russell Means said: With or without Native American blood, “we have ascertained that Ward Churchill is a full-blooded Indian leader.”

Some of the rest of us have ascertained that he is also a hypocrite.

That’s not a firing offense. It’s not a cause for censure or even investigation. It is merely a reality check about who subsidizes Churchill’s radical beliefs.